As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system (IHS) generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
The BIOS of a computing device (e.g., a type of IHS) may be used to control various aspects of the computing device. For example, the BIOS may be used to customize, provision, manage, and/or secure the computing device. Because unauthorized changes to the BIOS may be used to compromise the computing device's availability or compromise the integrity and/or confidentiality of data stored within the computing device, each BIOS may be protected using a password or similar mechanism. However, password protecting access to each BIOS may not scale to large (e.g., enterprise) infrastructures that include hundreds or thousands of computing device, and thus falls short of meeting the needs of enterprises undergoing acquisitions, reorganizations, infrastructure updates, end-of-life (EOL) or other lifecycle changes.
In addition, a distributor may provide products and services that include customizing the BIOS to the specific needs of an enterprise. The distributor may find modifying each BIOS of a multitude of devices for an enterprise customer to be a time consuming and error prone process.